AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY Star Rebecca Romijn Talks About Mystique's Makeup and Her Newfound Ownership of the Role

Rebecca Romijn is among a group of actors returning to their X-Men roles in the upcoming Marvel event film Avengers: Doomsday.

After playing the role in three major X-Men movies and one uncredited appearance, Romijn was fairly certain she was done playing the beautiful blue mutant.

But when the call came in from Marvel, she was eager to jump back in, despite a grueling makeup process she still keenly remembers.

In a recent interview with Inverse, Romijn detailed the 9-hour ordeal she sat through each time she previously played the role, ahead of 24-hour on and off shifts for months. It seems like that would be enough to deter her, but she was ready to jump back in. She explained:

“Nine hours every day, yeah. I’d go in at midnight to be ready at 9 a.m., and then I would want to shoot as much as possible. I would end up shooting like maybe 15 hours, and then it would take another three or four hours to take everything off.

“So I’d work like 24 hours straight, and then I’d have to have 24 hours off in between so that my skin could breathe because underneath all those prosthetics — which was on roughly 75% of my body — there was nowhere for the sweat to go when I was doing all the action stuff.

“And so I would blister underneath my prosthetics, and I would have to take 24 hours off in between with healing salves.

“But it was worth it. I’m telling you, that makeup process and that costume was the most beautiful costume I’ve ever seen. Every time we were finished with it, I would look in the mirror and go, ‘Wow, guys, it’s really beautiful.’

“But there are parts of it that made me irritable and put me in the perfect headspace to play somebody like Mystique.”

Naturally, the actress was interested in what taking on the role under Marvel would look like, so although she readily accepted the part, she had questions. She went on to say:

“First of all, it was a call that I was not expecting at all. And it was my very first question: ‘Let’s talk about the makeup process.’ It is a slightly different take [in Doomsday]. And of course I jumped at it; I couldn’t wait to do it again. It was also interesting because when I played her the first time, I didn’t have ownership.

“At the very beginning, I had impostor syndrome. I was young. Like, I was really young, and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I was just the girl who happened to be available.’ I had to audition, but I really was like, ‘This is a fluke. They’re about to find out that I have no business being here.’

“But that was just me in my youth. We’ve all gone through that. I didn’t have that at all this time going back. I went back in with so much ownership of her this time, and that was delightful.”

It’s going to be cool to see Romijn back in the role that she embodied for so long. She has a deep understanding of the character, and bringing that ownership back all these years later alongside her fellow X-Men as well as the Avengers will be awesome.

Avengers: Doomsday is set to be released on December 18th.